Fiction vs. Reality Quotes

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.

It's only a story, isn't it?"... "Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?

'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.

I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

Every tale is not to be believed.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

There is no story that is not true.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.

Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

We're growing up with a very illiterate bunch of children who have somehow been taught that film is fact when, in fact, it's invention. Hopefully, an historical film will inspire people to go and read about the history but in the end it is a work of fiction and selection. As for the armour itself, no it wasn't particularly comfortable.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

I don't discuss my own beliefs in public, but I will say the beliefs I've given my characters do not necessarily represent what I myself believe.

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

There are the people who read my horror novels - the first two of them - and they found them scary or whatever, and then there are some people who are maybe not entirely stable who think that they're real, who think that they're being stalked by the same demons or ghosts that are mentioned in the books.